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| Passengers descending into the Oxford Circus station in central London on Friday night.Daniel Leal-Olivas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images |
LONDON -The London Underground, the world’s oldest subway
system, opened a new chapter in its history on Friday night and Saturday
morning: For the first time, trains on two lines kept operating all night.
The late-night, weekend-only service, called the Night Tube,
began on the Central and Victoria Lines Lines and will extend to three
other lines in the fall. The idea was originally scheduled for September 2015,
but was put off because of labor disputes.
The Central and Victoria Line trains will run about every 10
minutes between 12:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday, serving 51 stations.
The two lines are among the busiest in the system, which serves 4.8 million
passengers a day.
London joined a small club of cities — New York, Vienna and
Copenhagen, among them — in offering weekend round-the-clock service. Like
Berlin and other cities, London has a network of night buses, and Transport for
London, the city’s transit agency, added eight new routes to its night-bus
network to complement the new late-night subway service.
The agency estimates that the new service will shorten the
average late-night trip by 20 minutes. About 200,000 people are expected to use
the new service each weekend. Even before the new service, the number of riders
using the system on Friday and Saturday nights had surged by around 70 percent
since 2000.
Safety is a concern in a capital where public drunkenness is
not uncommon, but on the first night at least, things seemed under control.
“We were worried people may fall off the escalators, or
fighting on the platforms, but we’ve been lucky,” said Faisal Ahmed, a Tube
worker at the Liverpool Street station on the Central Line.
Transport for London added about 500 employees to run the
Night Tube, and invested 3.4 million pounds (about $4.4 million) in additional
policing. By the time the three next Night Tube lines open, more than 100
officers will patrol a total of 144 stations at night.
“I was a bit worried about passengers’ alarms being pulled
or drunk people causing issues, but it’s been absolutely fine,” a driver,
Alicia Durant, 24, said as she walked to the northern end of a Victoria Line
train at the Brixton terminus to begin the journey north. (Her shift ran from 9
p.m. to 5.30 a.m.)
The Night Tube was announced in November 2013 — along with
750 job cuts and the closing of ticket offices.
Labor unions quickly raised objections, and in 2014 and
2015, employees went on a series of strikes, including a four-day Tube
disruption. An agreement on pay largely resolved the dispute in March, and the
start date of the Night Tube was announced in May by the city’s new mayor,
Sadiq Khan.
Mr. Khan met with Tube employees at the Oxford Circus
station (where the Central and Victoria Lines intersect) on Friday morning, and
then boarded the Victoria Line at Brixton just after midnight on Saturday. “I’m
really excited — 153 years after the first Tubes began in London, we are going
to have a Night Tube.It’s about helping people get to work, doctors, nurses,
porters, security guards, but also getting people to and from the theater, to
live music venues, home safely,” the mayor said
Riders agreed.
“We’re always in London on weekends,” Clare Adamberry, 57,
said as she sat next to a friend on a Victoria Line train at around 2 a.m. They
had stayed out late after a day trip to the southern city of Brighton, on the
English Channel. “I usually pay for cabs or Uber,” Ms. Adamberry said. “I have
an 18-year-old who goes out and takes night buses. It took her two and a half
hours to get home last week, taking different buses. I was on the phone with
her the whole time. If she’s not using the Night Tube tonight, she’ll be using
it tomorrow.”
Janka Horvatova, 27, is an assistant manager at a restaurant
near King’s Cross station and is responsible for closing it. “I can never catch
the last Tube, so I take two night buses, which can take up to 50 minutes,” she
said as she got off the train at the Stockwell station in South London, still
wearing her work clothes. “With the Night Tube, it took 15 minutes.”
edited from The New York Times
